Social media is too important to be kept in a silo, out on the edges of a business. According to analysts at Altimeter Group, that's a recipe for "social anarchy", leading to uncoordinated efforts, inconsistent messaging and communication breakdowns with customers.

Social media practitioners increasingly agree with that prognosis. As Leslie Berland, senior vice president of digital partnerships and development at American Express, comments in a 2013 report co-authored by management consultancy firm Deloitte and US-based business journal, MIT Sloan Management Review: "I think it's impossible to win in digital or in social media if you're approaching it in a siloed way. And you can see it when you see different [organisations] launching things in the social media space, especially if there's no alignment [with the business]. It's very transparent. It looks disjointed and unclear."

Fortunately, most organisations are now moving away from that approach and adopting a 'hub and spoke' model, says Kate Coopers, managing director of social media agency Bloom Worldwide.

"In companies that take a more mature approach," she explains, "there's still a central hub or department charged with leading the overall direction for social media within the organisation, but more and more delivery of social media is managed by the most relevant department, with customer service reps, for example, speaking directly to customers via social to resolve issues," she says.

That's the direction in which Jonathan Hopkins, head of digital at Nando's, is taking the restaurant chain. "We have a dedicated community manager with day-to-day responsibility for engaging with our fans and our customer experience team is there to support with any questions or problems that they might have," he says.

"We make sure that everything we hear from our fans reaches the right people. Suggestions for new Nando's locations go straight to the property team; potential new team members are introduced to our recruitment team; and any feedback from customers about their experience at a particular restaurant goes straight to that restaurant."

Distributing responsibility for social media to the relevant departments also enables companies to keep responding to customer queries on social media channels outside of regular office hours, points out Nadya Powell, managing director of social media agency MRY UK. "As a rule, social media channels should at least be open during the same hours as a company's call centre, because they're handling the same things - customers trying to reach your business with issues, concerns, complaints and praise."

In addition, by extending social media responsibilities to a wider cross-section of the workforce, businesses can decrease their reliance on external agencies to perform day-to-day social media tasks - a "false economy", according to Powell - and instead turn to them for more strategic help: coming up with new campaigns, for example, and streamlining escalation processes for dealing with online criticism.

But as companies increasingly adopt a 'hub and spoke' model for organising their social media presence, even their best-laid plans can run into hurdles in the form of a widespread social media skills gap, according to the Altimeter Group's analysts.

"The average corporate social business programme was established more than three years ago. Yet as social business efforts permeate the enterprise, those without 'social' in their titles often lag in understanding of the corporate social business strategy, let alone know how to use social media safely or effectively. The need for employee education on social media becomes apparent as social business programs formalise and mature," they write.

It's a need that computer company Dell has tackled head-on, with a social-media certification programme that has so far reached around 10,600 employees worldwide since its launch in August 2010, or just under one in ten of its workforce. That training can be delivered in-person, over the phone or via computer-based training, and consists of three required courses and at least one elective course, out of a choice of seven, each looking at a different social media platform, such as Twitter or Facebook.

"Our strategy at Dell is to embed social in our company DNA: it's just the way we communicate," says Amy Heiss, global programme manager for social media training and activation at the company. "The way we see it, it's part of everyone's job to use social media to get work done. Their regular day-to-day roles demand that they're social."

The first of the three required courses, she says, focus on Dell's social-media principles. "It's designed to keep employees out of trouble, by explaining our rules of social media, from protecting customer data to observing government regulations," she says.

The second course explains the company's expectations of employees when they're speaking on behalf of the company. The third course a guide to conveying the Dell brand consistently through social media activities, including the use of approved fonts, logos and language.

Few organisations have a workforce as tech-savvy as Dell's, of course, and the road to becoming a fully joined-up, social enterprise will be long and full of potholes. In a 2013 Harvard Business Review (HBR) survey of 2,100 executives worldwide, almost four out of five (79 percent) respondents say that their companies are either using or planning to use social media channels, but right now, only 12 percent feel that they do so effectively - not just for shouting out marketing messages, as more siloed companies do, but for promoting their brand, monitoring customer trends and researching new product ideas.